Goods4Girls Update

I was very sorry to note that Crunchy Chicken is shutting down her Goods4Girls project, which collects donated cloth menstrual pads for distribution at schools and orphanages in Uganda, Sudan, Kenya, etc. because her time is stretched too thin. Several people, including myself, left comments to the effect that we'd love to take on all or part of the project and keep it going. I imagine she'll be making a decision soon, since the domain name expires in a few weeks.

If not, and this is the end of Goods4Girls, I might try to do what I can on my own. If things go as planned, I'll be booking my ticket to Nairobi for a 3-week stint in East Africa, where I'll be spending half the time helping out at The Baobab Home. As I like to do when I travel to impoverished parts of the world, I was planning to bring out some of their Wish List supplies. Even if the scope of their work doesn't include adolescent girls, I'm sure they'll know how to direct me!

This week's donation hemorrhage

I sent monthly checks off to two charities this evening: $70 to Thai Freedom House (sadly, I had just one ThaiForGood client), and $50 to The Baobab Home in Tanzania.

I've also been stockpiling coupon freebies for the past week or so, and I've finally identified a couple of tiny charities here in NYC that want what I've got...

Bottomless Closet helps disadvantaged women get into a decent job - interview workshops, budgeting seminars, second-hand interview and work clothes, etc. They also distribute a "goodie bag" of toiletries, so I'll be sending along the bargains I get on name-brand cosmetics, hair care products, deodorant, fem hygiene, etc.

Homeless Youth Services runs a shelter for teens in need, mostly LGBT runaways. I'm not a member of the LGBT community (I'm "S"), and indeed have very conflicted feelings about the T segment, but at the end of the day they're all just kids trying to survive. Apparently they're getting overspill from Covenant House, wow. This shelter's needs are sometimes so basic it breaks my heart. They post a weekly needs list in their yahoo group, and everything is really tiny - like milk because the food bank is so strained that they can't provide it anymore, moisturizer for one of the trans girls because her skin is so dry it hurts, plain felt Christmas stockings for the kids to decorate for themselves, OTC cold tablets. They don't mind donations of partially used shampoos and such - which is awesome, because I have some products that just don't suit me. They're also happy to accept prepared food for Thanksgiving dinner...I'm generally a lousy cook, but I make great mashed potatoes.

Day 10 of the 10-Day Give

I was busy on Day 10...

First, I raided the paper recycling bins on 28 floors of my building and fished out about a dozen coupon inserts to chop up for the Overseas Coupon Program - 2 hours and $250 worth. I'll be swinging by the post office tomorrow morning to mail three week's worth of snippings: $1080.

Second, I gave a rather odd looking old man one of my half-price Thai massages - that's another $50 for Thai Freedom House. At the post office tomorrow, I'll be buying and sending a money order to them for $245: $165 worth of massage donations + $40 tip donations + $40 from my matching offer. I'm not getting as much interest in this offer as I'd hoped - I was willing and able to do twice as many. So I'm thinking of starting a blog-that-looks-like-a-website for it. I don't want to put a link to my regular business website because it has my phone number on it, and I don't want calls at 3am from idiots who think "Thai massage" is a euphemism for prostitution.

And today, I cashed in two coupons on sale items at the pharmacy for a total savings of $9 - which I put into the little Japanese jar I've earmarked for monthly donations to The Baobab Home in Tanzania. What can I say, the name of this blog is "CheapCharity", so why shouldn't a charity benefit from me being cheap??

Days 7-9 of The 10-Day Give

Got a little catching up to do here...

Day 7: Doubled the contents of the "Snowflake Savings" jar earmarked for The Baobab Home.

Day 8: Nothing - I've got two things lined up for Day 10 that really can't be done any other day. If you've been following my new giving habits, you can probably guess what they both are...

Day 9: Another Kiva loan, this time an unusual opportunity - a consortium of impoverished first-timers in the Dominican Republic with no history of entrepreneurship or successful past loans. Most loans are to tiny businesses that already exist, to give them the cashflow to expand, so I reckon the chances of default on this one are significantly higher than usual.

Day 4 of The 10-Day Give

I stumbled on Saturday, Day 2. I went for a 2-mile walk around midtown Manhattan in search of a homeless old person to give $5, but didn't run into anyone who fit the bill. Why am I being so picky? My rationale is that they're too old to work, they've lived through some awfully tough times (WW2, segregation, The Great Depression, etc), and things must be really bad either in their families or in their brain chemistry if this is what they're reduced to at their age.

So I made up for it by doubling my efforts with coupon clipping for the Overseas Coupon Program. Instead of one round of the paper recycling bins on 27 floors of my building, I did two - and that worked out superbly: I hit the motherload on the 11th floor. Someone reads a lot of different Sunday papers and hadn't thrown them out for a couple of weeks - I got multiples of RedPlum, SmartSourch and P&G. Last Sunday, I clipped $202 worth of coupons and it took an hour to snip, sort into two piles, and add up the value. This week it took 3 hours and yielded $629. I could have artificially boosted the total by including coupons that I suspect are useless (do you really think they stock $50 bags of organic dog food or gourmet Amish pasta at the Air Force base commissary in Okinawa??).

I also got another lovely email from Terri @ The Baobab Home yesterday. I'm planning to go to Kenya and Tanzania for my first ever trip to Africa, and I'm wondering how possible it would be to drop in and maybe bring hard-to-find-locally supplies. Apparently they've got a fundraising auction in TriBeCa next month, how cool is that!

Lisa @ Thai Freedom House also contacted me this morning, letting me know that the $120 I sent a few weeks ago plus $100 that a yoga instructor raised in a similar fashion helped her school/food programs through a rough patch last month. Between global inflation and the growth of her charity, their monthly expenses are currently $1500 instead of the outdated figure of $1000 mentioned on her website. So far I've raised $195 and am hoping that I'll do one more massage-for-charity before I mail her a check at the end of the week.

Day 2 of The 10-Day Give

I haven't yet decided what form today's act of giving will take. It was going to be a Kiva loan, but ever since they decided to disburse small sums each time a borrower made a repayment instead of waiting for the loan to be fully paid off, there has been a dearth of loans. I will update this post later when I figure out what to do.

In the meantime, I'd like to share the thank-you email I got this afternoon from the director of The Baobab Home (yesterday's recipient):

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Thank you so much for donating! We are so busy and so grateful for new donors.

This past week we took in a new baby girl found in a bus station. She seems fat and healthy and we are hoping for a good HIV answer soon. We call her Laura Baraka. And Last night we received two orphaned boys ages 13 and 6. They are the sweetest boys- rail thin and need of a lot of restoration to health, but a delight to be with.

Please let us know how you heard about us!

Best wishes,
Terri Place
Director, The Baobab Home
www.tzkids.org

Day 1 of The 10-Day Give

Would you believe it took me ages to nail down a worthy recipient? Sometimes I surprise myself with my pickiness, but I guess that's the downside of ferreting out a small, non-religious charity that accepts donations through PayPal (2.9% fee) and not Network For Good (4.75% fee).
So I rounded down my PayPal cash balance to $100 even by donating $15.64 to The Baobab Home in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, which started out as an orphanage run by a New Jersey anthropologist and her Tanzanian husband, and has since expanded to include a number of local programs - a school, a farm, a breakfast club, etc.

Will I become a regular contributor? Too soon to say, but Tanzania is on my Hit List 2009 for a two-week odyssey, and I thought it might make my experience more significant if I create a connection and awareness in advance. I've started something similar with Kenya by contributing to Feed Villages and Goods4Girls, but this will be my first foray into Tanzania, where I anticipate spending the majority of any trip I take to East Africa.